Russia’s third ranked opera and ballet theater scored big name sponsorship from LUKoil to make its first US tour with an all Tchaikovsky program this January.  The provincial city of Perm, which lies at the foot of the Urals, has enjoyed a notable artistic history, claiming as home sons the architect Andrei Voronikhin, the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, and the writers Dmitrii Mamin-Sibiriak and Viktor Astafiev.  The Mariinsky Theater was evacuated there from Leningrad during World War II.  In 1965 the theater was named for Tchaikovsky, who was born nearby.  Since 1996 the Tchaikovsky State Opera and Ballet Theater of Perm, to give it its full name, has been led by the much honored and internationally recognized Armenian opera director and producer George Isaakyan, known for daring, innovative, and prize winning productions.  This year the theater celebrates its 135^th anniversary.
            Perm stopped at the Brooklyn Academy of Music first, to present a revival of Isaakyan’s 1999 production of Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa.  A thoroughly fictionalized and romanticized version of Ukraine’s struggle for independence in the early eighteenth century, the work’s title character is an aged Cossack hetman in love with a political ally’s young daughter, Mariia.  When Mariia’s hand is refused him, Mazeppa becomes enraged, abducts the girl, and intrigues to have her recalcitrant father imprisoned and then executed, all while siding against Russia with the invading Swedes.  After suffering military defeat alongside the invaders at the historic battle of Poltava (1709), he dishonorably kills the young girl’s valiant but neglected admirer (having his henchman stab him in the back in this production; in the original stage directions he responds to a challenge with a sword by shooting the man) and then abandons her to madness.  To tease our emotions more, the love between Mazeppa and Mariia is strangely genuine.
            Stanislav Fyesko’s sets grasp at many of these complexities, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.  Throughout the opera they are dominated by outsized bent nails of no obvious significance.  The overture, entitled “Mazeppa’s Ride,” and third act orchestral interlude, “the Battle of Poltava,” are illustrated by an erupting volcano followed by a lava flow, perhaps representing raging tempers.  Above the stage hangs an orb clutched by a talon, possibly that of the Romanov double-headed eagle menacingly crushing one of the Russian Empire’s peripheral peoples.  The costumes, also by Fyesko, suggest late nineteenth or early twentieth-century military and provincial civilian styles.
            Perm cast the well known Mariinsky baritone Viktor Chernomortsev in the title role.  His commanding if rotund presence and forceful Russian vocal idiom helped him look and act the part.  Irina Krikunova, who left an engineering career to take up singing, is destined for stardom.  Possessing a delicate soprano capable of answering Tchaikovsky’s most demanding passages, she performed Mariia’s music to near perfection.  Aleksandr Pogudin’s brassy bass delivered the part of Mazeppa’s friend and then rival Kochubei somewhat naively but with some promise.  The smaller roles suffered from a less talented cast.  Valery Platonov, Perm’s music director, gave a competent reading of Tchaikovsky’s score.  BAM’s smaller and relatively intimate space helped capture the work’s intimacy in a way that larger houses often do not.
            Two nights later the company crossed over to Manhattan to give a concert of operatic scenes from works both well known and obscure.  Along with a healthy dose of orchestral music, including Tchaikovsky’s Coronation March and several operatic dances, Perm’s soloists acquitted themselves well in most of the arias and scenes.  Chernomortsev stole the evening with Tomsky’s first act aria from The Queen of Spades.  Krikunova created the most female excitement in two of Liza’s scenes from that opera and in her aria from The Enchantress.  Together with that rarely performed opera, it was an uncommon treat to hear music from The Oprichnik, The Magic Slippers, Iolantha, and The Maid of Orleans.

This year marks the centennial of Richard Strauss’s once controversial operatic adaptation of the eponymous play by Oscar Wilde. Dresden’s Semperoper, which introduced the opera to the world, has marked the occasion with an innovative new production by Peter Mussbach. Moving beyond the historicism of opera has become more than a trend, and this production is no exception. Mussbach’s sets (he designed his own) are free not only of Biblical kitsch, but of any indication of time or place. The psychodrama unfolds in a floating maze of geometric shapes presented at sharp angles to the audience. A contorted hexagon outlines the stage, which is dominated by a large cube representing Herodes’s palace and a steeply inclined rectangle that confines the movement of the characters. Jochanaan’s cistern is suggested by the handles of a swimming pool ladder dropping off into a pitch black abyss. Shades of light, ranging from sultry purple through azure blue and bright peach, bathe the stage according to the work’s changes in mood. Costumes are basic post-modern black for Herodes’s court, loose-fitting white for Jochanaan, and frilly pink for the decidedly teenage Salome.

Mussbach’s approach engagingly draws attention to the characters and their complex sexual relationships, yet his staging falters in presenting several of the opera’s critical moments. Jochanaan is already on stage when the opera begins, leading one to wonder why Salome should call for him to be brought out of his place of imprisonment. The famous Dance of the Seven Veils is depicted more as a family squabble than the exotic set piece one usually sees. Nothing on stage responds to the driving percussion of the dance’s first bars or to its distinctive chords. Herodes smokes, and Herodias tries unsuccessfully to entice him; Salome achieves her “seduction” by making a few awkward ballet steps. In the final scene there is no severed head, no necrophilic kiss, and no step-familial murder. Salome crawls into Jochanaan’s body bag to perform her entire monologue. An ax-wielding Herodes appears ready to execute his own command to kill her, but runs off in delirium when he discovers that she has already expired (“Salome dies of desire,” the program notes rather implausibly explain). Mussbach’s imagination and technical achievements are strong and prove the opera’s ability to lend itself to new interpretations, but one wishes for fewer loose strings.

The Semperoper recruited for its celebratory production some of the best vocal talent at work in Germany, and the results were mostly successful. The American baritone Alan Titus, Bayreuth’s reigning Wotan, delivered a commanding Jochanaan, convincing in prophecy and unswerving in defiance. Evelyn Herlitzius, his recent Brünnhilde, overcame some early upper range difficulties to give a more than competent performance in the title role, despite the unfortunate acoustics created by the body bag in the final scene. With a couple of momentary exceptions, her voice was refreshingly free from the screeching common among today’s Salomes. Wolfgang Schmidt appears to be following the well-worn path from Heldentenor roles to Herodes, a part better suited to his occasionally nasal tenor. If his Wagner performances were never truly outstanding, he is at least making the transition gracefully in this production. Dagmar Peckova captured the psychotic urgency of Herodias’s singing, but her voice lacks the true dramatic power to bring out its vindictive best. Salome calls for a relatively numerous supporting cast of soloists, 13 in all, and the Semperoper’s roster supplied amply talented voices for these roles. Marc Albrecht led the theater’s equally adept orchestra in a fine playing of Strauss’s score.